Breakside Brewery Opens New Slabtown Portland Brewpub

Multi-award winning Breakside Brewery is pleased to announce the opening today, Monday, March 6th, 2017 of their new Slabtown brewpub at 1570 NW 22nd Ave, Portland, OR 97210. The three level, restaurant, and bar also has a custom JVNW 10 barrel brewhouse designed for optimizing hop flavor and aroma. Breakside has named the new Slabtown brewery (their 3rd brewhouse) the “Hop Lab” and it will produce hop forward beers designed to be served fresh at the pub and not kegged or distributed except for the occasional special event.

BREWERS
Will Jaquiss will lead the brewery at Slabtown. A graduate of Williams College and the Siebel Institute, Will has been the R&D Brewer at Breakside since 2015, and he is responsible for designing award- winning beers such as Will’s Alt and Hop Delivery Mechanism Double IPA. During Will’s tenure as our R&D brewer, he turned our “3 barrel basement brewery” at the Dekum pub into one of the most award-winning breweries in the world, including multiple medals at the World Beer Cup and Great American Beer Festival.

Joining Will as co-brewer will be Tom Fischer. Tom has worn many hats and is one of our longest tenured employees at Breakside, originally starting as a server and bartender. Tom has been a production brewer since early 2014 and has been involved in all aspects of brewing and cellaring.

Brewmaster Ben Edmunds and Director of Brewing Operations Jacob Leonard will work closely with Will and Tom on recipe design, process refinement, and overall brewery management.

FOCUS & STYLE
The Slabtown Brewpub will serve as our “hop lab,” and the majority of beers brewed here will be hop-forward.

“HOPPY BEERS” BEYOND IPAS
Brewers today have the greatest pantry of ingredients available to them in the history of brewing, especially hops. In the quest to discover the next Citra, Mosaic, or Simcoe, hop breeders have grown and developed numerous other varietals, many of which are wonderful hops but not great for American IPAs. We want to focus on these “non IPA” varietals and try to expand the vocabulary that we use to talk about hops and hop forward beers.

A BREWHOUSE DESIGNED AROUND MAXIMIZING HOP FLAVOR AND CREATING DIFFERENT WAYS TO USE HOPS

We’ve designed a brewery around the idea of optimizing hop flavor and aroma.

BREWPUB FRESHNESS AND EXCLUSIVITY
Get it here, get it now, get it fresh. For the past years, we’ve focused carefully on shelf stability, on the perfect “30 day” IPA. Slabtown is our opportunity to swing the pendulum the other direction and focus on intensely fresh beer. We won’t be kegging the beers from Slabtown and sending them to our other pubs. Save for the occasional special event or two, they’ll be available on site only. We’ve crafted a lineup of entirely new beers that we think will shine with this sort of showcase.

“THE SEEKER SERIES” OF IPAS: BEERS THAT HONOR THE DIVERSITY OF INDIA PALE ALE
We want to pay tribute to the great IPAs that we’ve encountered over the years. Rather than argue about which regional variant of IPA is the best, we want to brew them all. Our “Seeker” series of IPAs will be our take on what we feel are the paradigmatic regional IPAs found worldwide:

• the golden, resinous, strong IPAs of Southern California typified by friends at Pizza Port, Bagby, Beachwood, Noble Ale Works, and Ballast Point
• the soft , hazy and estery IPAs of New England in the vein of Hill Farmstead, Nightshift, and Trillium
• the piney and citric IPAs of the Pacific Northwest and Northern California made timeless by Firestone Walker, Russian River, and Barley Brown’s
• the over-the-top, weighty IPAs of the Midwest inspired by Fat Heads, Columbus Brewing, Brew Kettle, Three Floyds and Surly
• the rich and saturating IPAs of the Mountain West a vein that runs from Melvin in Jackson WY south through Denver to Albuquerque, home of Bosque, La Cumbre, and Canteen
• the fruity and oily IPAs from the Southern Hemisphere.

BREAKSIDE BRINGS AN ADVENTUROUS SPIRIT TO SLABTOWN WITH A SHOWPIECE BREWPUB OPENING BEERS

SOMETHING WICKED: A New England-inspired IPA with loads of Mosaic and Citra hops. Part of our “Seeker” series

We’ll eventually establish a few of the beers as our full-time house beers, but the tap list will rotate with a wide range of different new beers. At any given time, customers can expect 2-3 house IPAs, 2-3 additional hop forward beers on draft, a lager, a dark beer, a fruit/culinary/sour beer, and 1-3 additional rotating selections. Beyond that, we’ll supplement the draft list with core beers from the Breakside lineup brewed at Milwaukie, and a large selection of bottles including many limited, barrel-aged and sour beers.

ABOUT BREAKSIDE BREWERY
Breakside Brewery opened in 2010 in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Northeast Portland as a restaurant and pub brewery The brewery gained attention early on for its innovative, experimental and diverse beers, while also winning a first medal at the Great American Beer Festival in 2011. In 2013, Breakside expanded operations to Milwaukie, OR with a 30 bbl production brewery filled with 30, 60 and 120 barrel tanks, barrel rooms for wild and non-wild/sour fermentations, and a 24-tap tasting room.

In 2014 Breakside was awarded with the highly coveted Gold Medal for American-Style IPA at the Great American Beer Festival for their flagship IPA, which was also named to Men’s Journal’s 100 Best Beers In The World and the best beer in Oregon by The Oregonian. Breakside is also known for their portfolio of barrel-aged and sour beers like Bourbon Barrel-Aged Aztec, a strong amber ale with chocolate and chilies, that won Bronze at both Chicago’s Festival of Barrel-Aged Beers and Best of Craft Beer Awards, and Passionfruit Sour a fruited berliner-weisse style beer that earned a Bronze at the 2013 Great American Beer festival.
In 2016, Breakside plans to open a new brewpub in Northwest Portland’s Slabtown neighborhood.

Breakside Beers are available on draft and in 22oz bottles in Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Northern California, Colorado, Idaho, British Columbia, and Alberta.